Ubisoft Entertainment SA’s Watch Dogs, the latest major original franchise to come out of the publisher’s acclaimed Montreal studio, could well become the next household name in mature games when it launches on all major platforms both current and next generation this fall.

Post Arcade was in the room when the French game maker showed off half an hour of live play in Manhattan Thursday, and this open-world action game — which has been in the works for nearly five years and is clearly meant to compete with the likes of Rockstar’s mammoth Grand Theft Auto franchise — was looking every bit a blockbuster.

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A story clearly born of our times — and perhaps prescient of things to come in the near future — Watch Dogs stars Aiden Pearce, a high-tech criminal-turned-anti-heroic-vigilante obsessed with taking revenge on people who attacked his family.

The action is set in Chicago, but this isn’t quite the Chi-town we know. Instead, it’s a metropolis managed by a massive mainframe called CtOS — short for Central Operating System. This supercomputer controls countless surveillance cameras, traffic signals, and public transit operations, and is even connected with the populace’s personal networks.

Watch Dogs aims to explore what might happen when a clever hacker cracks such a powerful system and gains access to a city’s infrastructure and its citizens’ private information.

“We’re fundamentally exploring a grey area here,” senior producer Dominic Guay said, explaining that he and his team were interested in getting into the space nestled between the typically stark boundaries of morality and immorality seen in most games.

The demonstration –which was running on PlayStation 4 hardware and doing a great job of selling the system’s graphics potential — didn’t give away much about the game’s larger narrative. It highlighted instead some of the main themes that run throughout the experience, including our paranoia around privacy, digital voyeurism, and even cyber terrorism.

The action started off in the Wards, a run down, economically depressed, crime-ridden area of Chicago. Watch Dogs‘ animation director Colin Graham took the controls of the coat-and-cap-clad Aiden and decided his first order of business ought to be to gain access to the city network in this particular neighbourhood. Hack the server centre for a specific area of the city, Mr. Guay explained as Mr. Graham played, and its local network opens up like a flower.

He ran through streets crowded with dilapidated old houses until he was standing in front of a walled compound. After a bit of quick reconnaissance, he clambered over a low mesh fence and snuck into the facility undetected. Mr. Graham’s plan was clearly to use stealth. However, he unintentionally caused a commotion while taking down a guard he wanted to distract by hacking a gate and was forced into a firefight.

Once the bullets began to fly he relied on a game feature called Focus to slow down time, which gave him a few seconds to strategize in the heat of the action. This is how he remote hacked a forklift to make it raise its load, removing cover from the guard hiding behind it so he could pump him full of lead.

Then it was all over. It was a slick sequence that demonstrated the game’s pliability. Everything — starting with the decision to hack the control centre and ending with the firefight — was instigated by and depended heavily on player actions. Circumstances changed based on how Mr. Graham elected to tackle new situations as they came up.

But there’s another factor at work beyond player freedom that’s meant to ensure these situations never play out the same way twice.

Prior to the demonstration Mr. Guay explained that the game’s engine — dubbed Disrupt — was custom-built for Watch Dogs. What’s more, it was explicitly engineered to give Ubisoft’s designers the ability to craft background game systems that facilitate complex causes with vast, ripplng, unpredictable effects.

The example he used involved hacking traffic lights.

You can spontaneously hack lights at hundreds of corners throughout the city, and the outcome will never be the same twice. Effects depend on variable conditions that include traffic, pedestrians, and even the weather.

Turning a red light green, for example, may or may not cause an accident, depending on whether cars are present, how fast they’re travelling, and road conditions. If there is an accident, it might block the road, create cover for a firefight, or even result in a car plowing into a corner gas station pump causing an explosion. Passersby, meanwhile, may choose to call the police, hastening their arrival to the scene, or they may rush to help victims in need if that action seems more appropriate.

Such multifaceted causal relationships are the sort of things that beg players to experiment, either to see how much chaos they can cause or to try to create scenarios that even the game’s designers didn’t imagine — something which, Mr. Guay revealed in an interview after the session, has happened frequently during studio testing.

But as the demo continued it became apparent that many of Watch Dogs‘ most interesting — sometimes even creepy — play possibilities don’t centre on complicated action scenarios, but instead Aiden’s digital eavesdropping while moving among average citizens.

As our anti-hero walks the Windy City’s streets he can see real-time personal data feeds concerning everyone around him. You’ll know that the fat guy on your right has high blood pressure, where the well-dressed businesswoman who just turned the corner went on her last vacation, and that the scruffy looking guy just ahead has a suspiciously large amount of money in his bank account. (You can, should you choose, try to relieve him of it by hacking his PIN and heading to an instant teller.)

Perhaps the most egregious breach of privacy occurred when Mr. Graham had Aiden randomly hack the free public WiFi router of a nondescript apartment building. He was soon connected to a laptop webcam in an apartment suite that was capturing a couple sharing a quiet moment together on their couch. Then he switched to another live camera in the room and it was revealed the woman on the couch was actually a life-sized doll.

Something about this scene struck me as uncomfortably voyeuristic. Did I really want to see that? Even in a game?

I was informed after the demo during a chat with lead story designer Kevin Shortt that this a big part of what the game’s all about.

“We want players to slow down and observe what’s happening around them,” he said. “We want them to understand the context of events and make their own decisions about what Aiden should and shouldn’t do, where he should or shouldn’t draw the line.”

It’s worth noting, too, that the player can use Aiden’s privacy infringing ways to be something much more than a petty thief and a voyeur.

For example, you can use CtOS’s crime prediction system — enabled by the city’s surveillance cameras — to locate potential crimes before they happen, and, if you choose, try to thwart them.

At one point during the demo the map showed the possible scene of a future crime as a vague circle. Within the circle, Aiden casually strolled about looking for anyone who might be a perpetrator or a victim. The likelihood of both is represented as a dynamic percentage meter that moves up or down as arguments escalate and circumstances change.

If you find a situation in which you’re pretty sure something bad is going to happen — say, a guy threatening someone else with a baseball bat — you can choose to intercede. However, if you act too quickly and take down someone who hasn’t technically done anything wrong, the people around you may think you’re the one who’s up to no good and could call the police. At the very least it could affect your reputation with the citizens of Chicago.

Of course, you can always just do nothing.

But some situations look to be true tests of the player’s instinctive morality.

As Aiden passed one particularly shady looking fellow using his phone it became apparent from his text messages that he was a drug dealer and potentially involved in a rape. That’s a pretty hard situation to simply ignore.

And our protagonist isn’t immune to the City’s system of control, as became apparent when he went shopping for a new gun.

The TV behind the store clerk was playing a news bulletin that showed a surveillance picture of Aiden and named him a suspect in a recent incident. The shopkeeper pressed a silent alarm button. Police were everywhere within moments.

Aiden rushed from the store and soon found himself in a wild car chase that involved yet more clever hacking tactics, from remotely activating police blocker barricades at intersections to opening and closing parkade garage doors in an attempt to evade his pursuers.

At one point he was on foot, surrounded by police. Rather than kill them, Mr. Graham had Aiden enter Focus mode and targeted their knees for non-lethal shots. Shooting cops wouldn’t win Aiden any friends, Mr. Guay explained in his running commentary, but at least he wasn’t killing them — a distinction that Chicago’s virtual citizens were capable of understanding.

The chase climaxed with a spectacular motorcycle leap across the widening chasm created between the two halves of an elevating bridge he’d hacked to raise while riding across it.

Perhaps the most important question left hanging after the demo ended was whether Aiden is justified in any of his actions.

Would you, in his position and with his computer hacking skills (which aren’t all that unbelievable, all things considered), invade people’s privacy if you thought you could help them? Would you use the city’s infrastructure to your advantage to carry out vengeance in the names of those you love?

That’s a question we’ll all have a chance to answer for ourselves this fall.

There looks to be a lot more to this fascinating game, including a multiplayer mode designed to integrate seamlessly with the single-player experience, as well as a companion app that will jack into the multiplayer to allow players to use their phones and tablets to interact with people playing the game on PCs and consoles.

(If you see a strange coincidence in a game focused on the dangers of connectivity being one of the most connected games yet conceived, you’re not alone – read Dan Kaszor’s take on the matter here).

We’ll have more on Watch Dogs in coming weeks, including Q&As with Mr. Guay and Mr. Shortt.